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Broken Unions, Broken Nation, and the Lie that Keeps us Broke

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This isn't about taxes. It's not about spending. It's about what we want as a society.

Our choice is this. Find the money or lose our civilization. If we want safety, hire cops; if we want education, hire teachers; if we want roads, pay construction workers; if we want clean air, food, drugs and water, pay inspectors. If we want chaos, don't.

When you don't have enough cops and teachers and libraries and garbage collectors and maintenance workers where you live, you live in a dirty, dangerous, uneducated, crumbling place. And, selfish as they are, I don't think even the superrich want that.

So, how do we fix it? I'm not an expert in fiscal policy, but I know what we're doing now--or more to the point, not doing--isn't working. But I have a suggestion.

Find the money. See where the heaving oceans of untaxed wealth are hiding in plain sight, drowning everyone in their excess, demanding more and more and more--and tax them.

But I'm not here to debate the fine points of tax policy. I'm here to speak truth to power.

This is my warning to the powerful. You are starving our society to death. You've put a tourniquet around our civic neck and squeezed the life out of our revenue stream. If you keep it up, everything we cherish, everything we count on as Americans will die.

Call it restructuring, call it tax reform, call it budget normalization, call it whatever the hell you want, I don't care. But find the money.

Because if we don't: count on it. The next scapegoat is you.

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San Francisco based columnist, author, gym rat and novelist. My book, "The Confessions of a Catnip Junkie" is the best memoir ever written by a cat. Available on Amazon.com, or wherever fine literature is sold with no sales tax collected. For (more...)
 
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